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Sad news about BibleWorks

Posted: June 1st, 2018, 4:08 pm
by Jonathan Robie
BibleWorks is going out of business

You can still buy it - at a steeply discounted price - until June 15th.
BibleWorks has been serving the church for 26 years by providing a suite of professional tools aimed at enabling students of the Word to “rightly divide the word of truth”. But it has become increasingly apparent over the last few years that the need for our services has diminished to the point where we believe the Lord would have us use our gifts in other ways. Accordingly as of June 15, 2018 BibleWorks will cease operation as a provider of Bible software tools. We make this announcement with sadness, but also with gratitude to God and thankfulness to a multitude of faithful users who have stayed with us for a large part of their adult lives. We know that you will have many questions going forward and we will do our best to answer some of them here.

Re: Sad news about BibleWorks

Posted: June 1st, 2018, 5:38 pm
by Stirling Bartholomew
The resources available without cost are exploding. When Matthew posted recently about restrictive nonrestrictive relative clauses, it took me less than 90 seconds to find and download the monograph. I don't have a digital library, just a search engine with a few texts linked to a handful of old lexicons.

I dropped in for a rare visit on the Accordance Forum a few weeks ago. Someone asked if Accordance was future proof. Helen answered honestly that nothing (i.e., technology) is future proof. The future is full of surprises. In 2011 there was a fire sale on last years model, Panasonic Lumix G2 camera. For a very modest investment I was shooting with a whole closet full of 50 to 60-year-old Pentax lenses. This mixing of old technology with new technology is a scenario that rarely applies to software. I'm still using Gramcord Greek and Hebrew modules in Accordance. Time is running out, no more upgrades. I am running the Accordance version released in 2011. When Mac OS 10.13.5 arrives in September, I will not be installing it. I've done this before, I jumped from Lion to El Capitan. The bottom line here is chaos management. Retraining with new software gets to be annoying. I've been doing it since February 1979.

Microsoft and Apple march ever forward ensuring that you will not be using 50 to 60-year-old software.

Re: Sad news about BibleWorks

Posted: June 1st, 2018, 6:15 pm
by Jonathan Robie
Stirling Bartholomew wrote: June 1st, 2018, 5:38 pm The resources available without cost are exploding.
That's definitely true. And may that trend continue.

Re: Sad news about BibleWorks

Posted: June 1st, 2018, 6:33 pm
by Stirling Bartholomew
Jonathan Robie wrote: June 1st, 2018, 6:15 pm
Stirling Bartholomew wrote: June 1st, 2018, 5:38 pm The resources available without cost are exploding.
That's definitely true. And may that trend continue.
Certainly hope that it does improve. I was several weeks into my study of Athanasius On the Incarnation before I found a digital diglot[1]. The TLG Open Corpus includes all but the most important texts for Athanasius. The tools for church fathers have some catching up to do. Hyperlinking to a full up version of Lampe is needed.

[1]http://catholiclibrary.org/library/view ... &useLemma=

Re: Sad news about BibleWorks

Posted: June 2nd, 2018, 12:21 am
by daveburt
Stirling Bartholomew wrote: June 1st, 2018, 5:38 pmMicrosoft and Apple march ever forward ensuring that you will not be using 50 to 60-year-old software.
The nature of an operating system means that it needs to remain tied to the latest hardware -- its job is to make the latest hardware useful to application software.

But that doesn't mean we can't use old software. The solution is virtualisation and/or emulation. For example, DosBox runs old MS-DOS PC games, there are plenty of SNES emulators, and VirtualBox or something similar might be a good fit for running a particular piece of software (e.g. Accordance, BibleWorks, Logos version 3, ...) on an older Windows/Mac platform.